General RPG Lists: Stupidest Weapons

Goddamn, is this rant actually 14 freaking years old?  What the hell am I doing with my life?

Anyway, while this isn’t exactly a high-priority subject, it’s certainly high time we update and expand this list a bit.  There have been ever so many advances in the world of stupid weapons technology, after all.  And honestly, some of the existing entries could’ve been a bit more involved, anyway.  And thus I present to you the new, the improved, the still completely pointless, Stupidest Weapons List!



If there's one thing I could say is the most varied and creative part of the RPG genre, I would probably say it's the cast. You get just about every conceivable kind of person in RPG casts sooner or later. Some games kind of go crazy with it (ever look through the list of party members for Shining Force 1? Actual human beings are outnumbered something like 2 to 1; hell, there's about as many centaur characters in that game as normal people), but most have at least one quirky cast member that stands out.

But the second thing I would say is the most varied aspect of RPGs is definitely the weapons. Be they modern, futuristic, or of the past, weapons are everywhere, pulled from cultures across our globe. And not just actual weapons, either. Even humanity's impressive ingenuity for creating implements of death in the real world can't seem to satiate RPG creators' thirst for creative ways to smack people, so you quite commonly see even regular objects never intended for battle being used to kill stuff, and encounter weird weapons the RPG creators thought up themselves.

While this does give us a more varied RPG experience in general than just seeing a random hero poke stuff with a sword thousands of times in every game, it also means that we come across a great many characters armed with items that are just ridiculous for use in combat.  Some are clearly just shitty, ineffective weapons, some are just cringe-inducingly idiotic in concept or appearance, and plenty are both.  These are the dumbest RPG armaments!



15. Keyblades (Kingdom Hearts Series)

Oh, Keyblades.  You’re just always the exact right way to start this list.

Ignoring how dopey it is to be hitting things with a large key to begin with, look at the general shape and way that one holds a Keyblade. These things seem to be weapons that you grasp like a sword, with a similar heft and architecture, but they have the limited damaging area of an axe.  The handle is at the bottom and only the bottom, and it seems relatively lightweight, but the actual part you want to hit enemies with is usually a small, damaging area near the top.  So...basically, it is an Axe-Sword. You get the lighter weight and limited handling area of the sword, which lowers how much force you can apply to your swing, and also the very limited range of the axe, which lowers both how versatile it is and how dexterous you can be when using it at close range. All the negative parts of both axe and sword, with none of the positives!


14. Books (General RPGs)

I can almost understand a mage being armed with a magic book if they're shown to need to read it before casting a spell, but:

A: Most of the characters who use books as their physical weapon don't actually seem to look in the things at all for their spells.
B: What would be the point of having to flip through the damn book to the right page every time they wanted to use a spell, anyways? Even with bookmarks, that's a waste of time in battle.
C: It really wouldn't kill them to keep a knife or something in a pocket. Even a freakin' paring knife is going to be more effective than trying to bludgeon someone to death with bound paper.

I'm not asking for RPG mages to suddenly become great physical fighters or anything, but could we at least be given the impression that they're TRYING to defend themselves?


13. Knife on a String (Paulette, Arc the Lad 4)

Paulette’s out here, surrounded by people armed with swords and bows and guns and claws, and she’s just sincerely whirling around a steak knife she taped to a length of fucking yarn with all the confidence in the world.  Like she somehow hasn’t noticed that what she’s using to survive life-or-death combat situations is just a meaner version of that nickel yo-yo thing that old-timey cartoon characters use to cheat coin slots.  

For heaven’s sake, it’s not even attached to something sturdy like a chain or a rope or something.  Nor is the knife large enough to have any decent heft; if she doesn’t hit her target dead on, exactly on the point, it’s just gonna glance off them and cause maybe an unpleasant cut at most.  At least with, like, a flail or a kusarigama (those ninja-y blades on chains), there’s some mass and surface area.  Even a yo-yo can be weighted and deal decent blunt, breaking damage, without requiring a perfect bullseye.  And what happens if you DO get a perfect, straight knife stab in someone with this thing?  If it’s going deep enough to cause any real damage, the blade’s probably gonna get partly caught in some flesh or bones or something, making yanking it back a pain in the ass.  Even more of a pain since the shoelaces that Paulette’s tied to the knife don’t exactly look sturdy to begin with, so the line’s probably gonna break after a few good enough tugs.  This was deemed better than just carrying around an extra few knives and throwing them?


12. Blitzballs (Wakka, Final Fantasy 10)

...Fuck it.  I’m done fighting this.  Alright, internet, you’ve convinced me.  I accept it.  Blitzballs are fucking stupid as a weapon.

Are Wakka’s weapons of choice capable of dealing significant damage to an opponent?  Yes.  At least, some of them.  That’s the reason I defended them for so long.  Plenty of Wakka’s armaments have blades running along them that’ll slice something to ribbons, or spikes studding the things on all sides.  These are not like Paulette’s butter knife lanyard; these things would cause definite harm when thrown against an enemy by a reasonably athletically fit guy.

But Wakka’s holding these stupid spheres close to him, cradling each near and dear to him with the same nurturing instinct to keep it warm and safe that I assume all athletes express towards their Freudian sports equipment...which means that the man should basically be plunging serrated blades through his ribs and spikes through his arm from wrist to shoulder every single time battle breaks out.  And let’s not forget, he attacks by throwing the ball into an enemy, then catching it on the rebound; he should realistically be impaling or amputating his hand probably at least 20% of the time he attacks.

For that matter, these balls shouldn’t be rebounding to begin with.  If they’ve got all kinds of sharp sticky-out bits, then they ought to be getting stuck, or at least moderately impeded, whenever they make contact with the enemy, not smoothly bouncing back.  And for the ones that don’t have the sharp stuff to get in the way of this, well, then you’re just attempting to use a goddamn volleyball to protect yourself from bloodthirsty beasts and monsters--if I could live through getting hit in the head by a stray soccer ball in Phys Ed as an adolescent, you’d better believe it’s not gonna do much against a hostile sea titan the height of half a dozen men.  Unless the non-bladed variants of these things are supposed to be super heavy, but then they probably wouldn’t be bouncing back to Wakka, and I’d  sure as hell include “A Cannonball But You Throw It And Also It’s Got A Soft Exterior” on this list, anyway.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden gets a pass for its basketballs because it’s going for comedy, and Omori gets a pass for Kel's basketballs because the combat's all happening inside a kid's dream fantasy land.  FF10, though, plays this ridiculous concept straight, in the real world, and I’m out of excuses to make on this, so Blitzballs’ place here is earned.


11. Nunchucks (General RPGs)

Oh, yeah, that’s what I want.  Yeah, I want a tool that’s slightly more likely to seriously damage me than it is to hurt the guy I’m fighting.  I want an armament that simultaneously needs clear space immediately around me to maintain its necessary momentum and rotation, and is so incredibly short-range that there’s about a 3 inch difference between “Within Attacking Range” and “Too Close To Attack; Just Surrender Now And Save Us All Some Trouble.”  I want to spend as much time as it would take to thoroughly master a different weapon just to reach a point of no longer being a danger to myself with this one.  Fucking sign me up, baby, it’s time to trade the most fundamental, basic tenets of function in for the chance to tap someone with a stick that’s going just a bit faster than it otherwise would be from simply manually swinging it!  Booyah!


10. Gunblades (Final Fantasy 8)

Hey, here's a great idea: stick a sword onto a gun handle. This way, you'll have to specially learn how to swing it, since the weight and holding angle are completely different than a sword, it'll be more complicated and less usable in close combat than just a regular sword, and you'll have a lot of trouble using it for long-distance battling since your aim's thrown off by the fact that there's a solid metal blade on your barrel both adding tremendous weight and disrupting vision.  Sure, you'll need twice as much training to use it competently than you would to totally master using a sword or a gun separately...but hey, it's a gun that is a sword, so it MUST BE COOL, AM I RIGHT MY FELLOW ADOLESCENTS?

I'm really just waiting for webcomic Adventurers!'s joke about combined weapons to come true with SquareEnix, at this point. After key sword-axes and emo pistol-swords, you just know the Sword-Bomb is inevitable.


9. Musical Instruments (General RPGs)

Look, I'll be the last person not to acknowledge how painful bad sound can be. I’ve heard Maroon 5, same as the rest of us.  I’m aware that Jason Derulo exists.  Hell, I hail from the dark years of the early 2000s, the heyday of t.A.T.u.  But you know what? If some talentless Russian chick imitating a cat being drawn and quartered by unlubricated robot tigers running on a chalkboard with their claws out can't inflict physical wounds on me, then some bard managing to hurt a monster by plucking on a harp is stupid.

And using musical instruments to inflict physical trauma is even worse. I'm not anything even approaching knowledgeable about the things, but I'm still fairly certain that instruments are meant to be reasonably delicate tools relying on careful balance and structure to produce their sounds correctly, so taking your guitar and smashing people over the head with it is going to ruin it for its intended purpose of creating music,* and if you don't want to use it for music, then why the hell would you carry it around instead of a club or dagger or something?


8. Ridiculously Huge Weapons (General RPGs)

If you can’t lift it then it’s not a weapon.

Hell, even if we allow for the fact that RPG characters inexplicably CAN actually wield swords and boomerangs and whatnot that are as big or bigger than they themselves are, these things are still usually pretty stupid.  I mean, take that absurd inferiority complex that Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth is swinging around.  It may seem dangerous for just how much length it’s overcompensating with, but realistically, it’d be unwieldy to the point of uselessness in half the environments we see him use it in as it bounces off of, or worse, gets stuck in, walls and general decor.  And frankly, even in an open area, something like that’s easy to block with a shield or other sword, since, once you’re within 15 feet of the idiot, it can really only come at you in wide arcs.  If Nomura didn’t simp so goddamn hard for his bishy dreamboat, any halfway decent combatant with a sword, shield, tonfa, gauntlet, spear, bo staff, or a number of other weapons with blade-stopping capacity, would be able to easily get up in Sephiroth’s space and wreck his shit thanks to his inferior weapon.  Because, crazy as it sounds, human weapons might just be sized appropriately for human use for a reason.


7. Dolls (General RPGs)

Despite what the horror film genre would have us believe, dolls are not very menacing. They're small, they lack flexibility in their limbs, and they're usually made of either very soft or very breakable materials. If an evil doll is trying to kill you with a knife or something, you really shouldn't have all that much trouble with surviving. Just kick the damn thing away as it stiffly toddles up to you and then go somewhere else. Simple.

And it's not even like RPG characters who use attack dolls do so as competently as the stupid horror film ones. Lulu of Final Fantasy 10 just has her diminutive, cute plushie tackle an enemy. Yeah, because a cotton-stuffed foot-high muppet wannabe is really gonna meet with success when body-slamming a dragon. I know mages are meant for magic, but come ON. And Shadow Hearts 2's Gepetto's no better. If you're gonna have your damn doll do your attacks for you, ARM it with something; don't just change its dress and pretend that makes a difference.


6. Scrolls (Rita, Tales of Vesperia)

Scrolls.  As weapons.

Not implements of strangulation, mind.  Rita isn’t out here garroting her enemies.  No.  She is using scrolls and sashes and ribbons as melee weapons.  When Rita aims to strike her foe, she reaches for a scarf.  When she’s fighting for her life, the tool she wants in her hands to meet her opponent’s blade is a piece of parchment.  When it’s time for the party to upgrade their implements of death and destruction, the rest head to a blacksmith, but Rita?  Rita hones in on the nearest Jo-Ann Fabrics.

Isn’t Rita supposed to be the smart one in the group?  She’s arming herself with a weapon that has less damage output than just not having a weapon at all.


5. Figure-Skating Mecha-Pegleg (Serina, Conception 2)

I refuse to believe I have to elaborate on why this is here.


4. Headdresses (Red XIII, Final Fantasy 7)

Seriously? You have a lion dog wolf thing with claws and teeth, and the way he inflicts damage is...hitting people with his headdress?  I mean, it’d be idiotic no matter what character were using it, but they gave it to a combatant that already has his own built-in weaponry!

The funny thing is that even FF7 seems to know that there’s no possible physical way you could make a headdress an effective weapon without also making it a self-inflicting concussion machine.  I mean, look at how they have Red XIII attack with it!  He leaps forward and does a double somersault roll in midair against the enemy, because the only way to even pretend that a headdress can cause significant harm is apparently to buzz-saw it against someone while telling the laws of gravity and inertia to fuck right the hell off.


3. Twin Fenrirs (Dean, Wild Arms 5)

The blades of Dean’s pistols are coming out of the handle and going downward.  As idiotic as a gunblade is, at least both the gun and the blade are pointed at the bad guy!  And if you’re gonna have the blade of your silly combination weapon pointing somewhere else, why the hell would it be down!?  Especially when they’re so damn long!  Not only is it an awkward position with which to mount an offense using them, but all you’d have to do is push Dean’s arms down a little and his blades would get stuck in the ground!  No fucking wonder he holds these things up and at an angle all the time during battle; he’s probably afraid that if he actually pointed his guns properly at an enemy, he’d stab himself in the foot.  And what happens if his hand slips downward just a bit?  There’s no guard separating the handle from the giant fucking razorblade jutting down out of it.  A little jolt throws off his grip at all, and Dean’s gonna slice his hand down to the bone.

He doesn’t even USE the gun part as part of his regular attack for some reason, even though that’s the only part that can be easily and immediately brought to bear against any enemy that isn’t a fucking mole.  And you can’t even imagine that he uses the impractical blades because they do more damage somehow, the way people theorize that Squall does with the gunblade, because Dean’s critical hits show him firing submachine-gun-style, and doing huge damage as a result.  Yeah, no shit, dumbass, turns out you can do more damage if you stop stiffly banging a sword pointed the wrong way into your enemy and actually PULL THE FUCKING TRIGGER.


2. Tales of Legendia Mage Weapons (Grune, Shirley, and especially Norma, Tales of Legendia)

A future edition of this list might separate these, but for now, I’d really hate not to have keyblades on here, so we’re lumping ToL’s mages’ insistence on not being able to physically defend themselves all together.

Grune is going at people with an urn.  I mean, I get a minor background character in a movie grabbing a vase in a pinch to get a sneak attack on some goon while otherwise unarmed, but this ain’t a weapon of circumstance.  Pottery is Grune’s weapon of choice.  And that’s even stupider than it has to be, because these are implied to be the ceramics in which Grune is keeping the seeds of the summoned spirits until she finds the right place to plant them.  Remember how I said it was dumb to go using a finely-tuned, sensitive musical instrument to inflict blunt trauma?  Now imagine if instead of future performances of Wonderwall, you were jeopardizing the fetal states of the beings that maintain the forces of nature itself.  Grune’s just here bashing the flowerpot containing the balance of reality against some guy’s skull and it doesn’t bother her in the slightest.

...Well, I guess that DOES seem true to her character, actually.

Shirley attacks people with writing implements.  Do you really need me to explain why brandishing a quill against some dude with a battleaxe is a dumb idea?  And I swear to Urgathoa, if 1 of you assholes even THINKS about cracking wise about the pen being mightier than the sword...

And lastly there’s Norma.  Norma walks around knowing that at any given hour of the day, there’s a good chance she’s going to be accosted by armed soldiers, wolves, bears, and heaven knows what else, and with that in mind, she chooses to bring a drinking straw with her for protection.  Who fucking wakes up in the morning knowing that they’re going to be attacking a goddamn dragon later that day, and thinks, “Well, as long as he gets close enough that I can blow some bubbles on him, I should be golden”?

Jesus Christ, do magic-users in the Tales of series just not WANT to live, or something?


1. Trumpet Gun (Lyude, Baten Kaitos 1)

One is a firearm that propels objects at lethally high velocity at a target to penetrate its defenses and fatally smash its internal workings apart.

The other is a comparatively high-pitched member of the brass family of musical instruments, known especially for its prominent role in classical and jazz music.

Together, they are
TRUMPET GUN.

Seriously. It's a gun. That is a trumpet. Trumpet Gun. A trumpet that shoots things as a gun. Trumpet. Gun. A gun that is also a trumpet.

Why have you forsaken us, God?


Dishonorable Mention: Fatman and Experimental MIRV (Fallout Series)

Okay, now, this one kind of doesn't count as a stupid weapon, because, well...the Fatman and Experimental MIRV in Fallout basically fire small nuclear bombs. So unlike the rest of the attack tools on this list, they're actually extremely effective weapons. I mean, if you want to kill stuff, and you don't mind a hintof overkill, you won't find many better options than tossing a nuclear weapon at someone. It's usually the most destructive attack in the game, as it sure as hell should be, and I daresay most people who play Fallout have plenty of fun with it (myself included, I fully admit).

The stupid part that puts them on this list in some way, however, is that these weapons' throwing range barely qualifies them as grenade launchers. They seem closer to kids' slingshots, really. So basically, someone developed a weapon that would launch a nuclear bomb to land about 20 feet away from the holder. Raise your hands if you can think of a reason why this wouldn't work out so great, class!












* So, for that matter, will stuffing a rocket launcher and flamethrower inside of it. You and your stupid guitar weapon, Shadow Hearts 3's Ricardo.